Battle of Mu'tah

According to the scholars of history, the battle of Mu’tah was in the 8th year of Hijrah (629 AD). The background of this battle was that the Prophet Muhammad had sent a letter to the ruler of Busra, but the messenger was intercepted on the way and killed by Al-Ghassani, the Governor of Al-Balqa.

This was considered to be a very serious crime had amounted to declaration of war. Urwah Ibn Zubair said Prophet Muhammad sent this expedition to Mu’tah in in Jumadah Al-Ula in the 6th year of Hijrah and appointed Zaid Ibn Harithah as the commander of the force, and said: ‘If Zaid were slain, then Ja’far Ibn Abi Talib was to take command, and of he were killed then ‘Abdullah Ibn Rawahah’.

Their number was 3,000. They went on their way as far as Ma’an in Syria where they heard that Heraclius had come down to Ma’ab in the Balqa’ with 100,000 Greeks joined by 100,000 men from Lakhm, Judham, Al-Qayn, Bahra and Bali.

The two armies met in or near the village of Mu’tah. After Muslims had arranged themselves in rows, each of the three commanders dismounted his shoes and fought on foot in hand-to-hand combat.

When fighting began Zaid ibn Harithah fought holding the Messenger’s standard, until he died from loss of blood among the spears of the enemy. Then Ja’far took it and fought with it until he was martyred, Abdullah Ibn Rawahah took the standard and fought until he died a martyr.

According to ostensible eyewitnesses, Ja’far received thirty or more wounds on the lower part of his body and exactly seventy-two sword blows and one spear wound on the upper part of his torso.

It was Thabit b. Arqam came forward and grabbed the standard and when he saw Khalid Ibn Walid he ordered him to take hold of the standard. Khalid was elected as the commander and he was able to maintain his heavily outnumbers army of 3,000 men against an army of 10,000 of the Byzantine Empire and Ghassanid Arabs.

Khalid Ibn Walid said: on the day of the battle of Mu’tah nine swords were broken in my hand, and nothing was left in hand except a Yemenite sword of mine.

Twelve Muslim men were martyred on that day. The casualties among the Romans were unknown.
Battle of Mu'tah

Hatay Province, Turkey

Hatay is the modern name for the historic Sanjak of Alexandretta, at the eastern end of Turkey’s Mediterranean coast.  A nation call Hatay only existed for a short period of time in the 1930s, in the coastal border region between Turkey and Syria.

The city of Alexandretta was founded by Alexander the Great around 330 BC. Just under a thousand years later the Arabs conquered it and translated its name to Iskenderun.

Antakya is a city in south Turkey and the capital of Hatay Province. Founded in 300 BC by Seleucus I, it earned the title ‘queen of the east’. It was taken by Pompey in 64 BC.

Hatay was the subject of an international dispute between Turkey, to which it belonged from 1516 until 1918, and France which occupied it at the end of World War I and later under the terms of the Franklin-Bullion Agreement in 1921, incorporated it into Syria as an autonomic district.

Iskenderun was occupied by the English in 1918, turned over to the French in 1919, and incorporated into French Protectorate of Syria as the Sanjak of Alexandretta. In 1938 Ataturk reclaimed it for the Turkish Republic.
Hatay Province, Turkey

Bayt al-Hikma

Mosque libraries became the first public libraries in Islam used by students, teachers, worshipers and anyone who sought a particular book. As compared to mosques and madrasa, the Bayt al-Hikma had more secular than spiritual material.

Bayt al-Hikma was a caliphal institution in Baghdad that is best characterized as a library with a number of limited scholarly functions but without most of the attributes of scholarly interchange that historians have sought to embody in it. It was founded to promote research in scientific and technological areas. Bayt al-Hikma has been variously described as a royal archive, a library and the nerve center of the translation movement.

It was also known as dar al-hikma and hizanat al-Hikma. Persons explicitly associated with the Bayt al-Hikma were administrators, copyists, and binders. Like every library, the Bayt al-Hikma was a place where one came to copy works.

One is familiar with a certain Allan b. Hasan al-Shu’ubi, a bookseller with shop in Baghdad and renowned copyist: he worked in the Bayt al-Hikma for Harun al-Rasyid, al-Ma’mum and Barmedices and without doubt he also made some copies there to sell in his shop.

Ibn Nadim report that the astrologer al-Fadl ibn Nawbaht was at the hizanat al-Hikma for Harun Al-Rashid; he translated from Persian into Arabic and relied in his scholarship on the books of Iran.

The centre was said to house thousands of books. Of particular interest to the Abbasids were books on philosophy, medicine, and science in Greek, although books in Pahlavi, Sanskrit and other languages were also collected. Al-Ma’mum intensified efforts to translate the books into Arabic.

Other activities had the Bayt al-Hikma as their setting. Reunions of scholars took place there but, paradoxically, those with which concern the religious sciences.

People from all countries came to Baghdad in ruder to study various sciences in libraries where the books were completely the disposal of all users.
Bayt al-Hikma